


four steps

by silvercistern



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Emotional Dysregulation, M/M, Mental Illness, Thoughts of Self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-11-12
Packaged: 2018-08-30 12:07:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8532421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvercistern/pseuds/silvercistern
Summary: Being an idiot wasn’t something you could control. It wasn’t his fault if he was bad at kanji or English. He couldn’t make himself smart. But he was one of the best at volleyball. Or he had been. Now that he wasn't, what was he good for? Fukurodani loses Nationals.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i have never written a "vent fic" before. but here is one. it has been a painful week.
> 
> unbeta-ed, written in about two hours.

The bathtub was drained.

He was sitting in it, knees knocking together as the tepid water on his skin chilled despite the humid air of the bathroom. His fingers and toes looked like umeboshi. It felt like he’d messed up, letting them get that way.  

_messed up messed up messed up_

He’d taken four steps instead of three and ruined everything.

 

He was too cold for just the towel so he dried himself quick. He’d seen in movies how Americans had huge towels, big enough to sleep under, and he wondered what something like that felt like, wrapped around your arms and going all the way down to your ass. Why were they so big? Did they just wear towels around the house, instead of putting on their clothes?

His fingers were still umeboshi, and one hurt a little, warping the callus on his pointer finger that was always kind of fucked up. He delicately wiped the tips against the fogged mirror to see if umeboshi fingers left any kind of weird marks. It was hard to tell. He’d have to ask Kuroo how to do it scientifically.

Under his pile of clothes his phone was buzzing, telling him to take his medicine but he didn’t want to take his medicine because umeboshi fingers aside he wanted to feel bad because he deserved to feel bad he had taken four steps instead of three.

 

Akaashi never messaged more than once between replies. But today was a special day because he was sending at least thirty at once despite not getting a single response. It made the alert set for incoming Akaashi messages pretty annoying. The cacophony of hoots was probably what summoned his mom. She came in, holding his sleepy little sister and the basket with all his pills in it. He was still only in a pair of clean gym shorts.

“Time to refill your organizer for the week, Koutarou,” she said softly, like a wind in trees. He had always wanted to be soft, like her and his sister and Akaashi but he wasn’t; he was just loud and annoying and taking four steps when he shouldn’t. 

He took the basket – they’d moved everything into the basket because it made soft sounds not loud upsetting cracks like the plastic bin had – and sat on the floor. He fished out the long strip of flimsy plastic cells and opened all the little doors on top. It was satisfying, all the clicks, but someday he was going to mess up and rip them open too hard and then it would be broken.

He’d taken four steps he _had_ just him. And he–

“Koutarou,” his mom gently touched his bare shoulder. “You need to do this and then take your medicine.”

He picked up the biggest bottle and poured them into his hand. The pink capsules felt puffy in his palm like they’d float if he threw them in the air. They were easy. But then he dropped one of the tiny ones on the floor, then scrambled to find it because what if Yuzuki accidentally found it and ate it? She might die. He might kill his little sister. 

His fingers were too big and shaky and he couldn’t pick it up.

_Four steps four steps four steps._

“I’ve got it, Koucchan,” she knelt down and picked up the pill with her delicate fingers. Yuzuki reached out for him, too sleepy to do anything but whine. He didn’t want to hold her right now.

He threw the six night pills into his mouth and swallowed them dry. Shaking her head, his mom passed him a bottle of water and a few rice crackers from the basket.

“You’ll get acid reflux if you don’t have something to eat.”

If he didn’t eat she wouldn’t leave him alone. And she had to go because if she didn’t he was going to lose it, he was so close to losing it and he wanted her to hug him so _bad_ but he didn’t deserve it because he’d always taken three steps but he hadn’t when it mattered the most.

An enormous ball of badness was growing in his mind, overpowering everything else. Everything that touched his heart made it bigger, stronger. He didn’t want her to be nice, he wanted her to hit him really hard, maybe until it was hard to walk. Even though he was pretty certain his mom would walk in front of a car before she did that.

The chubby legs of his sister were plopped down in his lap. The instant their mom let her go, Yuzuki curled into his bare chest, sucking on her thumb.

“I want you to breathe, Koutarou,” his mom sat down next to him. “Today was very hard, but it is almost over.”

He wanted to slam his head against the wall, over and over until blood ran from his nose into his mouth. People who took four steps even though they practiced every waking minute to do otherwise needed to learn some other way. And that was by getting the shit kicked out of them.

“Koutarou, please remember you are holding your little sister, and you must be gentle with yourself or she will get scared.”

She was snoring a little, her spitty fist clenched against his chest. Like he was just a person, not someone who had taken four steps and ruined things for his entire team.

His mom carded her fingers through his wet hair, “You are a lot of things to many people, honey. Volleyball is important to just a few.”

It didn’t help.

The worst part is, he knew that she’d been practicing for a bad day. She read books, talked to his therapist, and took Akaashi aside for secret conversations. They wanted to help, they were trying to help but he couldn’t be helped.

And even if he could, he didn’t deserve it.

 _I’m proud of you_ , his mom said, along with many other things that made her sound really stupid because they weren’t true. He was the _worst_. He cried, hot heavy tears, as frantic hooting let him know that Akaashi was sending message after message. He was getting his sister’s head wet, her fine hair sticking together in little clumps.

“They’re just thoughts, Koutarou. Let them pass through the doors in your mind.”

She never seemed to get that they wouldn’t _fit_ , he couldn’t make them fit. They rolled around, slamming against the walls fucking everything up. He had to make them stop. Everyone else was soft and he was hard and scratchy. There was only one thing he was good at and he’d taken four steps, which made that one thing meaningless.  

His sister started to cry, which meant that his mom would take her. He was relieved, and felt worse. Yuzuki had probably been able to tell that he wasn’t holding her right. The moment her body was lifted off of his lap, there was a knock at the door. His mother took the pill basket and his sister and left, after a long gentle kiss on his temple that should have been a slap.

 

Being an idiot wasn’t something you could control. It wasn’t his fault if he was bad at kanji or English. He couldn’t make himself smart. But he was one of the _best_ at volleyball and if he couldn’t even take three steps what was he _good for_?

He paced in his room, his head was dark and dark and dark and two voices were fighting in there. One was the black one, the big ball of failure and rage that was so loud in his ears he wanted to pierce his own eardrums. You couldn’t even tell what it was saying, just a long, horrible scream.

The other was Akaashi’s. It hadn’t always been him. Once it had been his dad’s, or at least how Bokuto remembered how he’d been before he’d walked out. One day Akaashi had shown up instead, making it so much worse.

“You are so selfish for being upset like this, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi said softly. He was always wearing a perfect black suit, and his hair gleamed like it was made out of strands of black glass.

He was always right. Bokuto was selfish. He was terrible. He needed to be hurt.

“You are weak, Bokuto-san,” Akaashi’s voice was crisp and polite, as the screaming ball of pain next to him slammed into Bokuto’s mind over, and over, and over.

“People who fail are not given the liberty of mourning their failure, Bokuto-san.”

Bokuto started punching his desk. The pain helped, for a minute his mind couldn’t feel anything else but how much it hurt, so the writhing agony and overwhelming guilt were quiet. Just for a minute.

“This is unacceptable, Bokuto-san.”

Akaashi’s voice was back even though all he could feel was his screaming knuckles as he slammed them into the wood. Then there were hands, grabbing his arms and yanking so hard, pulling him away from the desk. But he fought, and he won, hitting the person in the face with his elbow.

Hitting the real Akaashi.

Bokuto laid on the floor with his hair in his hands and pulled as hard as he could as he wept in a way that sounded more like screaming.

 

With a bloody nose and a black eye, Akaashi still picked him up like a bride and put him on the bed. It hadn’t been romantic. He’d staggered, most of Bokuto sitting on his thighs as he squat-waddled across the room. But he’d done it.

They were sitting next to each other, Bokuto’s knees pulled in, Akaashi’s blood on his chest, and snot running down his face. He was disgusting. The Akaashi in his head described every single way he had failed, while the dark feral ball of emotion raged. He dug his fingers through his shorts into the soft skin of his upper thighs, but it wasn’t enough pain, now that he’d fucked up Akaashi’s face.

Next to him, Akaashi sat ramrod straight. He was wearing one of his weird t-shirts, the one with the setting dog, and it was ruined because there was blood all over the neck of it.  

They were both quiet, even though Bokuto’s mind was about to explode. He wrenched harder at his thighs, and then Akaashi’s much stronger hands were on his, pulling them away, and sitting them on his own leg. More like holding them there.

“I understand you feel disappointed in yourself, Bokuto-san,” he said after the shock of the action had gone away. “I share your disappointment as your vice-captain. Though I do not assign the blame to you, I believe that you feel an even greater sense of responsibility for our loss.”

“I fucked up the run-up,” Bokuto’s voice creaked, and he was still crying, _he couldn’t even talk without crying what was wrong with him_? the Akaashi in his head asked gently.

“It was a terrible setup,” Akaashi countered, wiping his bloody nose on his arm. “Your steps stuttered because the final destination of my set was unclear. If you fucked up, so did I.”

He’d now heard Akaashi swear a total of four times, and the other three had been directed at Kuroo.

But it didn’t help. If he were one of the best spikers in Japan, he could work with any set, no matter how bad. _Please note, Bokuto-san_ , the Akaashi in his head spoke up, _how you have hurt me. Look at my eyes, they’re puffy because I was crying before you even broke my nose. Crying because you failed. Because you weren’t the best, you broke my heart._

“There is no such thing as ‘the best,’ Bokuto-san,” Akaashi said, flatter than normal. Either he’d got in Bokuto’s head somehow, or Bokuto had said something out loud.

“Yeah, there is! Sakusa is, he’s number one. And he beat us in the last set all because I couldn’t get the run-up right.”

Saying it out loud made the roaring ball of emotions nearly deafening.

But Akaashi was louder.

“’The best’ implies a long term victory, which is not possible. For instance, in terms of basic physical power and skill, you and Ushijima-san are equal in all ways but one: you are faster. But he is left-handed. He has a less impressionable disposition, while you are much more creative. How can someone decide who is better? The rankings are nonsense. You might win on one day, he on another. And since you cannot play volleyball alone, there is the skill of the rest of us to be considered.”

“Sakusa-san is no different. He is certainly skilled, but he does not inspire his team to win the way that you do. And, if we are speaking pragmatically, if Karasuno’s number ten were as tall as I am, he would destroy everyone from sheer speed and jump height alone. Sakusa would be nothing more than an ant in the face of such athleticism.”

He laughed a little, imagining Shorty tall. He’d be fun to play against like that.

Akaashi squeezed his hands.

“Have you taken your–?”

Bokuto shook his head, “I don’t deserve to feel better.”

“Where did you hide it, Bokuto-san?” Akaashi’s grip started to hurt.

“I don’t–”

Akaashi started to shake, “I cannot hold myself together much longer, Bokuto-san. If we are to comfort each other, you must calm down. I… am hurting as well. Has it ever crossed your mind that I rely on you?”

Bokuto looked at him, red everywhere, his face, his arm, his shirt and rimming his eyes. He wanted to help. He hadn’t even noticed. And he felt guilty about it, but it wasn’t the kind that made him want to claw at his arms. Maybe he could still help. Maybe.

“In my desk drawer,” he muttered.

The Akaashi in his head was still talking, but Bokuto couldn’t hear him over the screeching sound of his drawer as it was pulled open to find a tiny orange pill. Akaashi grabbed the water bottle, and a tissue, then returned to his side. He watched intently as Bokuto swallowed the pill and the water, then used what was left to clean off his face and his arm.

“I’m sorry I didn’t help. Didn't notice you were sad,” Bokuto said into his own chest. He realized for the first time since Akaashi’s arrival that he was wearing nothing but shorts.

Akaashi was still stiff against him, but there was a smile in his voice, “If I were with you for your perception I would have left some time ago.”

Bokuto didn’t have the energy to complain, the monster in his head still roared and he sat, nearly paralyzed with it. Akaashi pulled off his shirt and pants then they lay in his bed, skin to skin, absorbed in misery.

Little orange pills can’t turn four steps into three, and gentle hands in black curls can’t undo a botched setup. Love can’t drive away the pain of shattered dreams.

But it is better than suffering alone.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i dunno what to tell you man, this is what emotional dysregulation is really like.


End file.
